


Broken Beyond Repair

by Waffilicious



Category: BioShock, Dead Space
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 11:08:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waffilicious/pseuds/Waffilicious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack washes ashore after escaping Rapture and is quickly taken into a mental institution by a government agency. There, amid doctors and nurses and drugs, he meets Isaac Clarke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Beyond Repair

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for an RP AU where Jack and Isaac are members of a secret government agency made up of people with absolutely no ties left to the world. They get together later on, but this is just how they met.

    When they bring him in, it’s because they’ve received reports of a monster on the beach, roaring and attacking people, setting things on fire with a snap of his fingers, throwing things around with his mind, and electrocuting bystanders with power from his crackling, electrified hand. They take him before the police arrive, smooth the situation over, and assess the damage. No one’s dead, which is a blessing. Or maybe it was intentional, since it’s clear from the man’s strength and abilities and state of mind that he could very easily have slaughtered the entire beach, but he didn’t.

    There are girls with him. Five girls, none of them older than ten, and they cling to him, try to talk sense to him, but he doesn’t seem to be able to hear. They take the girls away and that affects him badly. He lashes out, and this time he is out to kill, but they fill his bloodstream with enough sedatives to knock out an elephant and it does the trick.

    They question the girls, who tell them they’re all from Rapture, and that the man saved them. The agents look at each other and pass the word along. They’ve heard of Rapture. They had tried to keep an eye on it, and even send an agent down to infiltrate it, but the agent was lost, and the city was cut off from the surface.

    Needless to say, the agency has been very curious about the state of Rapture.

    But the girls seem to have a very skewed memory of events, and the only other witness is insane and, judging by the scars on his neck and the testimony of the girls, incapable of speech.

    When he wakes up, locked in a cell, they try to speak with him and ask him questions. He could only roar inhumanly in response. It is a deep, beastial howl that rattles their bones and hurts their ears. He tries to hurt himself, knocking his head against the wall and clawing at his wrists with his nails, scratching at skin and hitting himself hard enough to bruise.

    They put him in a straightjacket and sedate him again.

    They bring in doctors to assess the injury to his throat, because they need answers, and he can’t speak to them like this. The doctors are horrified at the extent of the damage, but when asked if they can fix it, they say they can.

    The surgery lasts over twenty-four hours, but when it is done, the man has a voice again. They strap him down to a bed in a padded cell while he recovers, so as not to damage himself further.

    Two weeks later, they can’t shut him up. They try to question him, and he tries to answer, and it is clear to the psychiatrists that he is really attempting to answer clearly, but the words come out jumbled, rambling, nonsensical. He tells them he needs Eve, but he won’t explain who that is, describing her only as “blue.” He tells them he needs alcohol, but the psychiatrists shake their heads. It would be a bad combination with the drugs they are giving him to try to help him.

    But nothing helps, and the only clear information they get out of him is his name.

    Jack.

    He seems to settle into a balanced sort of insanity, rambling and chatting and occasionally trying to hurt himself but managing to refrain from hurting others for the most part. They decide it’s safe to let him out into the common areas with some of the others, believing that a little interaction will do him some sort of good, but they don’t let him out of the straightjacket, and they keep him sedated enough to prevent him from doing too much harm.

    The first man he talks to is the one named Isaac, brought in at roughly the same time as Jack, and Jack seems to take a liking to him almost immediately, sitting down and resting his head on the table while he stares at the other man in a straightjacket and rambles pleasantly to him about what whales look like as they swim by an underwater city. And Isaac, who had been reclusive and unwilling to interact with anybody, seems to listen.

    As the weeks go on they become nearly inseparable, and Jack starts to tell a slightly more coherent story about Rapture and what happened to him there. Isaac and the doctors listen. And as more time goes by, Isaac starts to tell his own story, slowly, hesitantly, but Jack listens too.

    Jack is still a dangerous man. There are days worse than others, when he kicks over tables and chairs and slams his head against walls and howls brokenly, sobbing and wailing. Occasionally he tries to kick or bite the orderlies. Sometimes he succeeds. Sedation generally does the trick, but incredibly, so does Isaac, wandering over and bumping Jack gently with his head or sometimes even tripping him and kneeling by him when he falls to the floor. And Jack quiets, and lets the orderlies sedate him.

    There are scientists who come and study him, take blood samples and ask him questions, because they haven’t forgotten the things he did on the beach or what he’s described to Isaac. They’ve learned that ADAM and EVE are not people but compounds that change a person’s genetic structure, a perfect stem cell which can become whatever a clever geneticist wants it to be and which can give an ordinary person incredible powers.

    Jack, they learn, is a genetic marvel, spliced and created and made to be genetically perfect. If he weren’t so mentally unstable, they’d try to bring him to the research facility in Virginia, but as he is right now that’s impossible. So they content themselves with taking samples and studying them elsewhere.

    Events continue like this for a long time. Jack continues to be unstable, occasionally violent, and unable to communicate rationally. The scientists come and go. They ask him what he knows about ADAM and EVE, but what he knows isn’t much and is filtered through an insane mind. They quickly learn, however, that without the sea slug that produces ADAM it’s virtually impossible to replicate the stem cells exactly. With Jack’s DNA, they are able to study an echo of the original substance, but it takes a long time to get results.

    Almost a year after Jack was first brought in, the scientists bring their first attempt at a substitute EVE. The liquid in the hypo isn’t even blue, and when it’s injected into Jack it has no effect at all. He blithely asks if he’s supposed to feel different, and after careful observation, the scientists declare it a failure. They record the results and leave.

    The next several attempts are also failures of various kinds. Some are like the first and have no effect, some make Jack more violent and unstable, and one knocks him out completely, leaving him in a semi-coma for two days. It’s the ninth attempt that finally starts to have a positive result. They inject it, and Jack’s eyes seem to clear, and he looks up at them with a steady gaze. He speaks to them, and it’s calm and rational. When they ask him to use a plasmid however, it causes him severe pain and he passes out. But it’s a step in the right direction.

    It takes them three years to synthesize a stable, effective EVE replacement. It’s still a shadow of the real thing, and Jack needs at least one hypo a day to keep him sane, but it works, and it’s enough to finally get him out of the hospital.

    Jack would have mixed feelings about leaving, except Isaac is on his way out as well. While the scientists were sticking him with needles, the psychiatrists were doing their work with Isaac, and now they’ve both been deemed sane enough that they’re offered work within the agency. Isaac is going to Chicago to build weapons and gadgets and Jack... well, Jack is offered work as a field agent with the provision that the scientists will be permitted to continue to study his plasmids and his DNA. He’s not sure if he likes the idea of being a professional lab rat, but Jack finds that after his time in Rapture and his years in Miami, he has an astonishing lack of options available to him. So he accepts.

    He accepts and is transferred to Virginia.


End file.
